Best Cookbooks and Food Writing
Top Books on Food and Drink for Yourself or Foodie Friends
Dec 7, 2007
Want to make a big impression on the foodie in your life? Give him or her something from the pick of the crop of 2007's best cookbooks and books about food and wine, the most lavish of which usually come out during the autumn each year. (You also might want to include one of these as a bonus present in a food gift basket.)
Some standouts:
The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter, 2007; $35 list). The legendary founder/chef of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, shares absolutely simple recipes for delicious home-cooked food.
Best Food Writing 2007 edited by Holly Hughes (Marlowe & Company, 2007; $15.95 list). A perfect paperback stocking-stuffer featuring 51 highly diverse pieces, all brilliantly written, by the likes of Ruth Reichl, Patrick Kuh, Calvin Trillin, Coleman Andrews, Molly O'Neill, Jeffrey Steingarten, and lesser-known but no less worthy talents.
A Great American Cook: Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Chefs by Jonathan Waxman (Houghton Mifflin, 2007; $35 list). An immodestly titled autobiographical cookbook featuring home-style recipes from an illustrious American chef.
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman (Wiley, 2007; $35 list). The popular, reliable New York Times food writer and author of How to Cook Everything turns his attention to mostly healthy vegetarian cuisine in this mammoth book any vegetable lover will want.
Lidia's Italy: 140 Simple and Delicious Recipes from the Ten Places in Italy Lidia Loves Mostby Lidia Bastianich (Knopf, 2007; $35 list). A beautiful book featuring authentic, easy-to-make regional cooking from one of America's most expert Italian chefs and television cooking stars.
My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals by Melanie Dunea (Bloomsbury USA, 2007; $39.95 list). Terrific, compulsive reading for foodies, as top chefs from around the world–including Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, Daniel Boulud, Anthony Bourdain, Jacques Pepin, Nobu Matsuhisa, Ferran Adria, and Lydia Bastianich–share their fantasy final meals.
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink edited by David Remnick (Random House, 2007; $29.95 list). Anyone who loves to read about food and drink will have a blast with this very generous compendium of many decades of great nonfiction and fiction from the pages of the New Yorker magazine, including pieces by writers as diverse and brilliant as Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, John McPhee, Roald Dahl, A.J. Liebling, Bill Buford, and M.F.K. Fisher.
The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones (Knopf, 2007; $24.95 list). The fascinating, beautifully written, long-awaited autobiography by the editor who shepherded the talents of cookbook authors including Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and Marcella Hazan—as well as literary giants like Anne Tyler and John Updike.
Welcome to Michael's: Great Food, Great People, Great Party! by Michael McCarty (Little, Brown, 2007; $40 list). A beautiful, exuberant book from the larger-than-life owner of the elite yet down-to-earth Michael's restaurants in New York and Santa Monica, with easy-to-make recipes for the food this pioneer of New American cooking prepares at home.
The World Atlas of Wine: Completely Revised and Updated, Sixth Edition by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson (Mitchell Beazley, 2007; $50 list). An exhaustive, impressive, massive compendium by one of today's acknowledged masters of the subject. If your wine-lover doesn't have a copy already, he and she will be extremely thankful for it. (Think about making this the featured item in a Wine-Lover's Food Gift Basket.)
Browse in your favorite bookstore, or at online booksellers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, for more great cookbook ideas! Want to learn how to write a great cookbook yourself? Click here!
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